Randall Albers

Randall Albers, Professor and Chair Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago, chaired the Fiction Writing Department, and founded the long-running Story Week Festival of Writers. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, Writers Digest, Writing in Education, Brevity,F Magazine, and Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck, among others. With Steve May, he authored the lead article in Creative Writing and Education, edited by Graeme Harper; and two chapters from his novel-in-progress, All the World Before Them, set during the Vietnam War, were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Rome for Columbia College.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda

Alejandro Almanza Pereda (b. 1977, Mexico City) lives and works in Guadalajara. He has done solo shows in different institutions like San Francisco Art Institute; Stanley Rubin Center, El Paso TX; Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; College of Wooster Art Museum Ohio; Art in General New York City. He is currently a member of La Rubia te Besa, an art band project.

Carlos Arango

Carlos Arango was a participant and survivor of the Mexican Student Movement of 1968, which culminated in the October 2nd massacre in which the army killed hundreds of people. He immigrated to the United States as a product of repression. Arrango did political and cultural education work with the Mexican community in Los Angeles, and later in Chicago, where he directed Casa Aztlán. He contributed to the formation of several pro-immigrant organizations and has worked for the political and human rights of immigrants at a binational level. He is currently the founder and collaborator of the Movimiento Mexicano.

William Ayers

William Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy, and education as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include TeachingTowardFreedom; FugitiveDays: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; Race Course: Against White Supremacy; and Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto.

Jim Becker

Jim Becker is a Chicago-based musician, producer, and sound engineer who has played around town and around the world since the 1980s. He has recorded and collaborated with a long list of rock, folk, experimental, and old-time bands. Jim tours the US and Europe extensively, most recently with Califone and Iron and Wine.

Libia Bianibi

Libia Bianibi (b. Juchitán, Oaxaca) is a cultural worker based in Chicago, doing operations for nonprofits through an equity lens. As an independent researcher, she analyzes how cultural policy and museological practices objectify indigenous peoples, while strategizing how to implement progressive values in the internal practices of arts organizations. She holds a BA in Art History from Universidad Iberoamericana and a MA in Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball is an artist who does installations, performances, sculptures, and editorial projects. She earned a BFA from UNAM and completed a postgraduate program at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. She has been awarded the Zurich Art Prize (2012) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (2013). Her most recent solo exhibitions include To-Day, February 20th, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art (2018); Pleasures of association, and poissons, such as love, Galerie Wedding – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin (2017); and Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances, San Francisco Art Institute (2016).

Edgar Cobián

The work of Edgar Cobián (b. 1978, Guadalajara, Mexico) covers different formats and media such as drawing, sculpture, and sound from a critical perspective. As a musician he performs in Cráneo Verde Humeante and Peor Aún. He is a member of the Organizing Committee of the Doña Pancha Fest, an underground festival.

Kristiana Rae Colón

Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. Her play Tilikum opened in June 2018 with Sideshow Theater. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.

Juan De La Mora

Juan De La Mora was born and raised on the south side of Chicago to Mexican immigrants. From the ages of 8 to 21, he worked every summer and winter break on semi-trailer mechanics with his Father. In 1997, he began studying architecture in Chicago at IIT, then transferred in 2000 to ETSAM in Madrid, Spain. He dropped out of school in 2005 to pursue an artist residency in Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal, for 2 years. He returned to IIT in 2007 and, upon finishing his degree, began working at Studio Gang Architects, where he is currently the Model Shop Director.

Mónica de la Torre

Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, including The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Feliz año nuevo, a volume of selected poetry published in Spain (Luces de Gálibo). Born and raised in Mexico City, she writes in, and translates into, Spanish and English, including the release of the only book written by cult, avant-garde Chilean poet Omar Cáceres, Defense of the Idol (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). De la Torre teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

Dos Santos

Dos Santos’s elasticity & consistency in live performance has earned them an enthusiastic & highly diverse audience in the too-often segregated Chicago music scene. Dos Santos have been steadily tipping forward into something more future-minded & universal, something that transcends the nationalism many of us are desperately trying to depart from, but don’t have the vocabulary to fully escape. Logos, their most recent album Logos (International Anthem), is a bold & vulnerable push into this transcendence. It presents an idealized new progressive American music, as rooted in Chicago as it is communicable with the world.

Rachel Galvin

Rachel Galvin’s most recent book Elevated Threat Level was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is also the author ofPulleys & Locomotion (poems) and News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945, and translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo, translated with Harris Feinsod, is forthcoming. Galvin is a co-founder of the Outranspo, an international creative translation collective, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Edgar Garcia

Edgar Garcia is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. Winner of the 2018 Fence Books Modern Poets Series Award, his collection of poems and anthropological essays—titled Skins of Columbus—will be published by Fence Books in March, 2019. His book of literary scholarship and critical theory—Signs of the Americas—will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Autumn of 2019.

Reginald Gibbons

Reginald Gibbons is the author of ten books of poems, a novel, and short fiction; translator of Mexican poets, as well as Spanish poets Luis Cernuda and Jorge Guillen; and co-translator of Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bakkhai, and Russian poets. He teaches at Northwestern University and is at work on a novel.

Jimena González

Jimena González (b. 2000, Mexico City) is a Mexican writer. She studies Hispanic Literature at UNAM and has participated in various spoken-word poetry events around Mexico City, in venues such as the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Casa del Lago UNAM, the Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art, and FIL Zócalo 2017, amongst others. González is a member of the writing community Proyecto POM, where she is currently the director of Poetry Slams for the Mexico City league, SLAMIN. In 2017 she published her first collection of poems/fanzine, “Nombrar la Sangre,” with Editorial Versonautas. PlayGround website calls her the youngest poet in Mexico.

Julián Herbert

Julián Herbert (b. 1971, Mexico) is a writer, musician, and distinguished professor who has won many prizes in his career as a novelist such as the Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen in 2003, the Premio Jaén de Novela Inédita 2011 for Canción de tumba (an elegy for his mother, translated and published in 2018 by Graywolf Press as Tomb Song) and the Premio de Novela Elena Poniatowska in 2012. He studied Spanish Literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila. His first novel, Un mundo infiel, was released in 2004 after trying his luck with four collections of poetry.

Salvador Jiménez-Flores

Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born in Mexico. In his work he explores the themes of colonization, migration, “the other,” stereotypes, and futurism. Most recently he completed a two year-long artist residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program at Harvard University. Also he served as the Artist-in-Residence for the City of Boston. Jiménez-Flores is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and was awarded the Kohler Arts Industry Residency for 2019. He was recently appointed Assistant Professor in ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Esteban King Alvarez

Esteban King Álvarez (b. 1986, Mexico) is a researcher, art historian, and curator. He holds an MA in Art History from the UNAM and is curator of the collective exhibitions Transcripciones (Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2014), Una red de líneas que se intersecan (ESPAC, 2016) and La nueva onda del silencio (El cuarto de máquinas, 2017), among others. From 2012 to 2015 he was curator and chief researcher at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. Since 2015 he has worked as curator at ESPAC, Contemporary Art Space, and is a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus is a NY Times bestselling author. With Guillermo del Toro, he co-authored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea Kraus and del Toro created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus co-authored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. Kraus’s next novel is The Living Dead, a posthumous collaboration with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. He has won two Odyssey Awards (for both Rotters and Scowler) and was a Library Guild selection, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Bram Stoker finalist, and more. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Mia Lopez

Mia Lopez is a curator, writer, and educator. In 2016 she joined the DePaul Art Museum as Assistant Curator, where she organizes exhibitions and programs with an emphasis on contemporary art which focuses on diversity and social concerns. As the 2013-2015 Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center she collaborated on exhibitions, programs, and catalogs including Art at the Center(2014) and International Pop (2015). An alumnus of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute, her writing has appeared in publications by the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Walker Art Center, and Prospect New Orleans.

Bill MacKay

Bill MacKay is a highly-regarded guitarist-composer-improviser based in Chicago. He is also a writer, activist, and visual artist. His most recent records Esker (Drag City, 2017), SpiderBeetleBee(Drag City, 2017) his second duo set with Ryley Walker, and Altamira (Ears & Eyes, 2015) by his band Darts & Arrows, reveal a startling range – from the folk of Appalachia, Avant-rock, and blues to gospel, jazz, raga excursions, and western-country modes. Yet out of this diversity, it’s the dynamic way which he ties his interests together that is key to his art.

Nicole Marroquin

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, activist and teacher educator whose current research looks at Chicago school uprisings between 1967–74. She has recently presented projects at the New School, the Newberry Library, Harold Washington Public Library, DePaul Museum of Art, Glass Curtain Gallery, Hull House Museum and Northwestern University. She received the Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz Women of Excellence Award in 2011 for her work in her community. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2008 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Fernanda Melchor

Fernanda Melchor (b. 1982, Veracruz, Mexico) is the author of the novels Falsa liebre (Almadía, 2013) and Temporada de huracanes (Random House Literature, 2017), and the book of essays Aquí no es Miami (Literature Random House, 2018). She is also a journalist who graduated from the Universidad Veracruzana, holds a Masters in Aesthetics and Art from the Autonomous University of Puebla, and has a specialization in political science from the Institut D'Études Politiques in Rennes, France. Her most recent novel, Temporada de huracanes, was considered by various media as the best Mexican novel of 2017 and is being translated into more than seven languages. The English translation of Temporada de Huracanes, Hurricane Season, is forthcoming in 2019 from New Directions, translated by Sophie Hughes.

José Olivarez

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His first book of poems, Citizen Illegal, is out now via Haymarket Books. He is a co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. A recipient of fellowships from Poets House, The Bronx Council On The Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and The Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poetsand elsewhere. He is the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors.

Emilio Rojas

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, writing, and sculpture. His practice engages in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. He holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Emilio is a translator, community activist, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.

Natalia Toledo

Natalia Toledo is a poet and writer from Juchitán, Oaxaca. She has published more than 10 books, including The Black Flower (Phoneme, 2015), which World Literature Today included amongst the 75 best translations in the world. Her poetry has been translated into Mazateco, Maya, Nahúatl, Mixteco, English, Slovanian, Italian, German, and Punjabi. In 2014 she was a finalist for the PLIA Award, the American Indigenous Literature Award. She cooks and designs jewelry and fabric. Toledo is a member of the Colectivo Binni Birí- Gente Hormiga, a collective dedicated to giving art and creation workshops to the victims of the September earthquakes in Juchitán, Oaxaca.